Remember when impeachment was going to be the seismic political event of 2020?
Neither does anybody else.
President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial, which seemed so important in January, was overwhelmed in short order by even more tumultuous developments: A deadly pandemic that hardened the nation’s partisan divide and upended the economy. A racial reckoning that reverberated through American governance and culture. A president’s baseless attacks on the election itself, raising doubts about the legitimacy of his successor among millions of voters.
The past 12 months have left the United States a different place than it was when the year began. An unfathomable 330,000 Americans have died of COVID-19. The government is bigger after passage of the most expansive relief packages in the nation’s history to address the costs of the virus, still not under control. In the wake of politics of the most brutal sort, some scholars and citizens worry that fundamental democratic institutions have been bruised.
Lamonte Williams waves a flag outside the Chase Center in Wilmington, Del.William Bretzger, Delaware News Journal
Will the changes stick? Will 2020 turn out to be an aberration or a turning point?
Americans recognized the high stakes set by a year that was shaped by a combination of forces no one had experienced. “We’ve seen a pandemic before; we’ve seen economic crisis; we’ve seen racial turmoil,” Princeton historian Kevin Kruse said in an interview. “But not all at once, not all together.”
Asked for the single word that described 2020, the most frequent response in a USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll this month was “awful” or “terrible” or “horrible,” adjectives chosen by nearly one in four. Fifteen percent used expletives that can’t be repeated here. Nearly all of the 1,000 registered voters surveyed Dec. 16-20 cited words that reflected strain or pain.
Only 7% chose positive words such as “OK/wonderful/good” or “enlightening/awakening.” Another 5% used neutral words, like “unprecedented” and “different.”
“We’re going to look back in 50 years and say this was the year of fundamental changes,” predicted Jim Messina, a veteran political strategist who ran President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign in 2012. Those changes have affected the contours of the economy, the power of social media, the strength of political parties’ bases and Americans’ views of the role of government.
“There’s this conception in Washington, D.C., that we’re going to go back to ‘normal’ now that Joe Biden is president,” Messina added. “But I just don’t think that is true.”
“We’re at a crossroads,” said Susan Stokes, director of the Chicago Center on Democracy at the University of Chicago, calling the moment “a big fork in the road.”
Here are four of the significant questions ahead about what direction the country will take next.
Was democracy damaged?
Trump challenged traditions and smashed norms from the moment he rode down the escalator at Trump Tower and launched his long-shot presidential bid in 2015. Never in modern times has an American politician provoked such heated controversies and survived, his political base unshaken. But nothing matched the potential repercussions of his assault on the democratic process itself during the final two months of his tenure, when he refused to recognize the results of the November election or to commit to the peaceful transfer of power.
Trump and his supporters filed dozens of lawsuits in eight battleground states; none of them gained legal traction. He lobbied governors and legislative leaders to take unprecedented maneuvers to overturn the certified count in battleground states. Even now, he is urging congressional Republicans to challenge the final Electoral College proceedings on Jan. 6.
While he has no realistic prospect of changing the outcome, Trump has succeeded in raising doubts among millions of his supporters about whether Biden won the White House fair and square. In the USA TODAY poll, a third of registered voters, including three in four Republicans, said Biden wasn’t legitimately elected, an assertion that has been repeatedly debunked by fact-checkers.
President Donald Trump continues to incorrectly assert fraud occurred in November’s presidential election.Patrick Semansky, AP
Those doubts could erode trust not only in the new president but also in the democratic process itself, political scientists and political practitioners warn.
“A lot of times the loser feels there was something wrong with the election, but usually the leadership gets itself up and dusts itself off and gets ready for the next time around,” Stokes said. “But if the leadership turns around and says, ‘This was stolen, this was fraudulent’ without any basis in truth or real kind of process or evidence, then the public will follow that – at the very least with a kind of ongoing decay in our democratic culture, and at the worst, violence.”
That “national culture of distrust” will test both parties and the next election, she said.
Was there a turning point on race?
On May 25, the final moments of George Floyd’s life were caught on a cellphone video. He pleaded for breath, and then for his mother, as a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes.
Clergy from the Minneapolis area march June 2 to the intersection where George Floyd died in police custody.Jack Gruber, USAT
Other cases of police misconduct toward Black people gained new attention and sparked more outrage, including the shootings of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky, Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta and Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
“That homemade video recording [of Floyd] shook the world,” said Michael Eric Dyson, a Vanderbilt professor and author of “Long Time Coming: Reckoning with Race in America,” published by St. Martin’s Press this month. “There’s no question that this year has been a game-changer in the first year of a new decade. There is no question that when you look at the pandemic of COVID, and the pandemic of race, and the presidential race, and all that it revealed about us as a nation – we’re astonished. We’re looking at each other.”
Not since the civil rights movement in the 1960s has there been such a powerful public response to and scrutiny of the nation’s record on race, and one that resonated with Black and white Americans. The debate that began on police reform also focused attention on the disproportionate impact of the coronavirus on people of color and on signs of systemic racism in housing, education and employment.
Dyson is optimistic about the future, but he and other advocates say the protests of the year won’t lead to lasting changes without difficult and sometimes controversial action ahead.
“I just hope that everyone understands that the symbolic gestures actually are important,” Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, said in August, “but they do not end the conversation.”
Will COVID-19 be vanquished?
In recent weeks, the initial distribution of two FDA-authorized vaccines for COVID-19 has given Americans hope that they can see a light at the end of the tunnel, of an end to the pandemic that has upended almost everything in American life.
At the same time, though, the tunnel has gotten darker than ever. The numbers of new cases, of hospitalizations and of deaths all reached new heights in December. The vaccines alone won’t bring the coronavirus under control for months or more.
Biden vows that the pandemic will be his first priority. It is likely to define his presidency, as it has defined Trump’s tenure. No new president has ever taken office in the midst of such a broad and deadly public health crisis with repercussions that are shaping other pressing challenges. The pandemic has thrown millions out of work and widened the nation’s economic divide.
Biden says he’ll start by asking all Americans to wear face masks, a common-sense measure that has become a bitter partisan divide. He’ll also have to persuade people to take the vaccine, another plea that will test their trust of him and their government.
In the USA TODAY poll this month, the percentage of those willing to take the vaccine as soon as they could jumped to 46%, up from 26% in late October. One in three wanted to wait. But one in five said they would never take it. Among Republicans, the partisan group that presumably will be the most resistant to Biden’s entreaties, 36% said they would never take it.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease specialist, now estimates that 70% to 90% of Americans need to be immune for the virus to fade and life to return to normal.
Allen Matthews, 42, an engineer from Lone Tree, Colorado, who was called in the survey, is among those who still needs to be convinced. “Probably just wait,” he said about taking the vaccine, unsure of its safety. “It needs to be out there for longer.”
Will voters be exhausted or engaged?
Nearly 160 million voters cast ballots in 2020, a record.
In an unexpected turn, the pandemic seems to have boosted turnout because it prompted many states to make voting easier, including an enormous expansion of mail voting, used by nearly half of all voters. Some states already have begun to debate whether to adopt or roll back some of those changes in future elections.
The partisan impact of higher participation – a good thing for democracy in general – was more complicated than pundits predicted beforehand. Democrats won the White House but Republicans gained ground down the ballot, including in the House of Representatives.
Biden received more than 81 million votes, nearly 12 million more than Obama got in 2008, the previous high-water mark. Even though Trump lost the popular vote, he broke the previous record, too, receiving more than 74 million votes.
The turnout rate was historic as well. In all, 66.7% of those eligible to vote did. That’s the highest in more than a century, since 1900, and part of a new trend. Turnout in the 2018 election had hit a midterm record, too, only four years after the 2014 midterms had scored the lowest turnout in seven decades.
Why the turnaround?
“There’s only one variable that changed between 2014 and 2018, and that’s Donald Trump,” said Michael McDonald, a University of Florida political scientist who runs the United States Election Project. “It’s clear that people have a visceral reaction to him: Love him or hate him.”
That raises the question of whether the jump in turnout will continue after Trump no longer stands at center stage in politics. He has energized voters both for and against him, but he has also left some exhausted by his shifting policies, provocative rhetoric and chaotic style of decision-making – all of those epitomized by his favored 280-character means of communication, Twitter.
McDonald, for one, predicts that the Trump turnout effect will persist. “A lot of research shows voting is habit-forming,” he said. “When you vote once, you’re more likely to vote again.”
Contributing: Sarah Elbeshbishi
President-elect Joe Biden receives a COVID-19 vaccine and urges Americans to do the same.ap
Blaine Higgs, who is seeking a third term in office as premier, said today he wants all students to enter adulthood with a better understanding of how money works.
The new curriculum would teach students about budgeting, bank accounts, interest rates, inflation, mortgages, leases, loans and RRSPs, among other things.
Meanwhile, Liberal Leader Susan Holt pledged that, if elected to govern, her party would overhaul the province’s approach to mental health and addiction care by adding community outreach workers to deliver frontline support.
She says these frontline workers would help school psychologists, which she said are in short supply.
Later in the day, Green Party Leader David Coon said a Green government would impose a 2.5 per cent rent cap as part of a broader plan to increase the supply of affordable housing.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 26, 2024.
Macron arrived last night from New York and had an informal dinner at Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s home at Rideau Cottage.
The two are having a formal meeting on Parliament Hill this morning before travelling to Montreal, where Macron will visit Quebec dignitaries and see the Port of Montreal.
The visit comes as both leaders face a rise in populist movements and discontent that has challenged each country’s policies on climate change and immigration.
It also follows a March vote by France’s senate to reject the European Union’s trade deal with Canada, against Macron’s wishes.
Macron last visited Canada in 2018 for a meeting of the G7 leaders.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 26, 2024.
MONCTON, N.B. – New Brunswick’s Liberal leader challenged her Progressive Conservative opponent on Wednesday night to explain how his plan to cut hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes will help fund a health system struggling to care for a growing population.
Susan Holt, the Liberal Opposition leader trying to deny Blaine Higgs a third term in office, said his promise to cut the harmonized sales tax by two percentage points — to 13 per cent — is irresponsible and risks pushing the province toward privatized health care.
“The premier has made the single most expensive campaign commitment of anyone on this stage … more expensive than the entire platform that a Holt government is going to put forward,” she told the leaders debate in Moncton, N.B., hosted by CBC.
When fully implemented, the tax cut will cost $450 million a year, a number Holt said will put services at risk, especially health care, at a time when tens of thousands of residents are without a family doctor — and the province’s population is growing rapidly, mostly by immigration.
And she took aim at Higgs’s claim that his tax cuts reflect the reality that “people can spend money better than government.”
Holt said, “to hear him say that New Brunswickers are better at spending their money themselves — sounds a lot to me like he thinks we’re moving into private health care.”
Higgs said Holt’s suggestion that his policies were leading to private health care is baseless — “no foundation whatsoever.”
The government, he said, is spending $1 billion more a year on health care than it was five years ago. “But there would be those who say ‘spend more money on health care and it will get better.’ And I say we need to find a way to do health care better.”
He said his government will find innovative ways to bring health services to citizens, such as expending the scope of practice of nurses and pharmacists.
Green Party Leader David Coon, meanwhile, said his party would end the centralization and privatization of the health system, promising to grant more autonomy to regional hospitals.
“We have a state of emergency in our health care system. It is Code Orange. Everyone has to get on deck. And it’s going to require a generational investment to fix our health-care system” said Coon, whose party has promised to spend $380 million a year on health care.
“That’s the money that Mr. Higgs wants to eliminate from an HST cut,” the Green leader said.
The debate marks a key milestone in the provincial election campaign, which started last Thursday and will end with a provincewide vote on Oct. 21. But there wasn’t that much actual debating Wednesday night — the format precluded leaders from challenging each other. In fact, one of the moderators said at the start of the evening, “there will be no open debate.”
Instead, viewers were offered a series of quasi speeches by leaders, peppered with retorts to each other’s statements. Among the issues they discussed were safe injection sites and changes to the province’s policy on sexual orientation and gender identity in schools.
New Brunswick has one safe injection site in Moncton, and in response to a moderator’s question about whether a Liberal government would open more, Holt said she was not aware of any applications for others. “But what we do need is real treatment for people who are struggling,” she said.
Coon said his government would “never” prohibit the use of a safe injection site, adding that substance use was a symptom of trauma.
Higgs, meanwhile, said his party will not open any new sites and will review the mission and results of the one that exists.
A highly contentious issue in the province is a requirement by the Higgs government that teachers get permission of parents before they can use the preferred names and pronouns of students under 16. Higgs said this policy respects “parents rights,” while his critics say it discriminates against trans youth.
During the debate, a moderator mentioned an anti-abortion group called the Campaign Life Coalition, which has mailed about 160,000 flyers claiming “gender ideology” was being taught in schools and that it was leading to “surgical mutilation.”
Higgs said that while he has no connection to the group, those flyers are protected by free speech. “I find it really shocking that the discussion around parents and their involvement with their minor age children is such a debate,” he said.
The Green and Liberal leaders said there is a severe shortage of teachers, who are now being accused of abusing children by activist groups. Holt said it was disappointing that Higgs refused to condemn the flyers; Coon also criticized the Tory leader for not speaking out against the “vile pamphlets.”
“Mr. Higgs seems to be quite comfortable with these pamphlets circulating,” Coon said. “He hasn’t condemned them as we have, and he should if he thinks they’re a problem. … There are big challenges in the education system, and Mr. Higgs has gone looking for problems where they don’t exist. He’s not a problem solver. He’s a problem creator.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 25, 2024.
